On My Mind XI

4. Out of Brooklyn: Wanting to be Let In to the City

Productive Themes

My work is driven by my curiosity and a sense of where I can make a contribution. When I look over that work, of course my training as a scientist plays a big role—mostly in giving me ideas about how to think about phenomena. The other pervasive theme is mixture and pollution, that no matter how much we might like perfection and purity and simplicity, there is always violation of that perfection--impurity and pollution. If we have some idea of how the world is organized (whether we are Hegel or the modern physicist), we are likely to be chastised by actual phenomena and their variety and persistent peculiarity.  Design is just provisional, again perhaps by a committee that “botched and bungled” it (as Hume would say) until they had something that sort-of worked. Whatever we might see as sacred has a history, and in that history it was once not so considered as sacred, and a great deal of effort was needed to sacralize that part of the world.  And, the rules of kinship or of particle interaction almost always have exceptions that point to other rules. 

Out of Brooklyn

I have lived a life of work, following my nose, blindly confident in my curiosity.  My nose is pressed against the window, and I want to be let in, to find out what’s going on here, in this field, in this work, in this seminar or paper. Again, I’m unlikely to be able to understand the technical details, I’m subject to being bamboozled, and I am unlikely to find errors in the argument that depend on deep knowledge of the field and of previous work. What I am good at, what serves my curiosity, is seeing it whole, connected, the big picture, the essence. I want to understand, for myself, although, again, I am likely to miss many details and particulars. What’s it all about? What are the secret handshakes, the unstated but obvious facts about work of this sort, that makes it authoritative and makes it make sense. I think for a living for that is how I can make my peace with the world.

I hope I am smart enough to discern what’s going on, or at least to ask the right sort of questions from the right people or sources, so that I can figure out what is going on. I’m unlikely to be able to judge the work in terms of the field of endeavor, and place it in terms of its predecessors, and to judge its quality. But I do judge whether it has interesting ideas, at least interesting to me, given what I know. So I may be overly impressed because my knowledge has lacunae in some obvious places. But my claim is for myself, for my own understanding, and perhaps I can explain the situation to others.

I’ve come to have some confidence in my judgment, although I receive my comeuppance more often than I would like. And I have come to realize that there is stuff I miss systematically: the tragic, the meanings of life, the great literary themes, the kind of stuff you discuss in college, personally, or in the humanities, professionally.

When I ask, What is going on here?, I am looking for a theme, a story, a mechanism, a technical peculiarity, an historical precedent or predecessor. So, recently, I saw a feature film and realized that, likely unwittingly, it paralleled Dante’s journey in the Inferno. If fortunate, an analogy to something I do know comes to mind immediately when I encounter the work, and it leads me into the work—although it might well lead me astray. I am continuously checking to be more sure I am going in a good direction, and I am quite willing to revise, to backtrack, to admit I am wrong or confused.

Having a big picture, I may be satisfied. Or, I may become more curious and try to learn enough to figure out more of what is going on. If I am fortunate, my curiosity leads me to understanding that is of more general interest.

I’m not cheating or claiming I really understand what is going on. I am tentative, and I check with the experts to see if what I am saying is obvious to them, or at least they do not find it objectionable. If they are generous, they will entertain my understanding, even if it is not-quite-right, or off-the-wall, given how the professionals and experts think, and they will push me in a more right direction.

I surely miss lots, and I misread or misinterpret the work, and there is lots of the work that I cannot fathom. I do want the big picture, and I guess or speculate or infer my way forward. I’m less worried about being wrong than missing what is going on. I would seem to have the capacity to be alone (together with the work or the object, and with unseen others), seeking resonances and sympathies, trolling for a bit of intellectual and analytic company, company that is unlikely to be present. I am different, at least in the context of the university academic specialization, not so much a conventional success, as someone who is trying to find out what is going on, and willing to be wrong or foolish if need be.

I’m thinking out loud in the office, the seminar, the library, trying to figure out: What is going on here?

I entitle this note Out of Brooklyn, for my curiosity and speculation are the way I could move out of Brooklyn and into Manhattan. What I did not realize, and still find it hard to realize, is that this mode of being is so different than most of the professors I encounter, although I suspect that they are better at hiding their motives than I am. I thought that my way of thinking for a living is the way to think for a living, but in fact other ways are rather more prevalent and likely acceptable. 

I come from the ends of the Subway lines in southeast Brooklyn, and I have been trying to get to the City ever since: the Sea Beach line to Coney Island, 3 stops shortof the end; the New Lots line, 1 stop short. Queens was as distant as Queen Elizabeth, as far as we knew, while Times Square was less than an hour away.  We visited family in the Bronx, Grand Concourse, rarely, but dutifully. In Borough Park, more frequently, but we had to change for the West End line. We never went to Bay Ridge, Greenpoint, nor to Pelham Bay Park or Flushing or Astoria. And we walked to 86th Street and Bay Parkway--but never followed the Parkway to the Bay itself. My father would go to Ravenswood, Red Hook, and elsewhere for work, but we never followed him to these locales. We shopped in downtown Brooklyn, Fulton Street and DeKalb Avenue, or Herald Square in Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Public Library main branch demanded two changes of train to get to Grand Army Plaza (and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden). I forget now how we got to Prospect Park. The main branches of the New York Public Library were perhaps more convenient but we did not use them. Once, I walked to Idylwild Airport from our apartment on Linden Boulevard and was rescued from there by my cousin Richard who drove his car to pick me up. We did not have a car, nor did I drive then. We never flew anyplace.

Flatbush was far away, or so it seemed as was Myrtle Avenue and so was the Bush Terminal (which we saw from the Subway train on our way to Manhattan, and what was it doing?). When the train, the Sea Beach line, went to Manhattan over the Manhattan Bridge, at the edge of Brooklyn we saw the world headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses and The Watchtower, but we were not sure who they were. We never stopped at 36th St or 59th Street in Brooklyn. To visit family, we would go to Grand Central Station and take the New Haven Rail Road to visit my Uncle Harry, or to Pennsylvania Station to Baltimore to visit my Aunt Betty (although I am not sure we ever did make this trip).

By the way, the Subway lines relevant to the part of Brooklyn I hailed from, Bensonhurst and  Gravesend, were the Brighton, Culver, Sea Beach, and West End Lines, going East to West. Now, I have a place in Union Square, and the Lines I am concerned with are the Broadway, Lexington Avenue, and the Canarsie Lines, although I can quickly get to almost any other line in a few stops. Queens still remains far away, except as encountered on the way to JFK Airport, or LaGuardia Airport. When I was at Columbia, I took the New Lots train to 96^th Street, and then got the Broadway Line to 116 St. From our physics laboratory in Ardsley-on-Hudson, one took the railroad to Grand Central or perhaps to 125 Street.

Models, Again

The motivation for the language and sentences I find myself using does come from the technical realm of natural science. To describe the world in terms of these models is not an imaginative exercise; rather, it is reading the world in terms of well-developed models and analogies, developed elsewhere. I am hoping to display the secrets behind these ways of thinking. For those appreciating the technical background, the models are more supple and complex than if they were taken to be merely a way of speaking—or so is the case for myself. Whatever insights one might have, those insights come as much from understanding the origins of the models as in any deeper thinking on one’s part.

Almost all the models I employ, even if drawn from mathematics and physics, are not meant to be studied quantitatively or formally as they might in their discipline of origin.  One might find data and some sort of relationship to test them out, but that is not my concern. Rather, for the most part the models and analogies might be understood stripped or abstracted of their origins in mathematics and physics, as suggestive and providing a vocabulary for thinking about the city. However, the motivation for the language and sentences I find myself using does come from the technical realm. 

Ideas for my writing and research derive from casual and professional reading, seminars, conversations with colleagues (often in fields far from my own), my formative education in high school and at Columbia College both in the humanities and in science. These ideas come to mind and to life because I have various issues and concerns already in mind, or what people say or write strikes me as wrongheaded. As I have said more than once, I do curiosity-driven research, disciplined by scholarship and an awareness of the traditions. My curiosity is likely latent, wakened by an encounter through reading and conversation.

What’s going on here?

Again, I think for a living. Formally, I am paid to teach, to do research and to disseminate that research through publication and lecturing. When I examine what I actually do, I find that for the most part I am thinking (sometimes, often, wasting time, not focused). I have ideas, and I spend my time figuring out how they fit into the context of known ideas and notions, figuring out how they might be appreciated in concrete cases, and writing in such a way that the ideas now appear as if anyone might have had them were they to be in my position. Yes, I spend time writing and fixing that writing, or preparing classes and delivering those lectures.  But for the most part I am thinking and constructing my materials. In class, I have lecture notes, but what I am doing is thinking them through. When I consult with students or colleagues about their work, I am thinking to figure out how to be helpful. And when I go to a seminar, I find that I am engaged in figuring out what is going on, never passively listening and taking notes, always looking for the story or notion that motivates what is going on.

So I have written about thinking and analogy, about reading and writing, and about words and pictures.

There is nothing peculiar about thinking for a living. Craftspeople such as plumbers must do it all the time. My thinking is conceptual and theoretical, but it is thinking nonetheless. What motivates my thinking are analogies that give a structure to what I am thinking about. Concrete models and pictures. I am always on the lookout for, What is going on here? Actually, of course, I have some idea immediately and then have to revise that idea as I learn more. 

Whatever I have written derives from some idea or some example, plucked out of the air or heard in a seminar or noticed in an article, and the problem became to see if that idea or example pointed to something deeper. I am not a maker of complex arguments, rather my thinking is through analogy and description, and what I write is a description of my idea in terms of concrete examples I have in mind. And it is not that I understand everything. Rather, I start out assuming I can understand something in terms of what I know or can readily find. Always, I have to be acutely aware of the limits of the parallels I see, and make claims that are at the right level of generality. Usually it is possible to poke holes in what I am claiming, but the claim has a strength and resilience that allows it to be repaired with little loss.